Savage Country

A Novel

“The year was 1873 and all about was the evidence of boom and bust, shattered dreams, foolish ambition, depredation, shame, greed, and cruelty . . .”

Onto this broken Western stage rides Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, come to town to settle his dead brother’s debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband’s folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land.

Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named “dead line” demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods—and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls.

Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead’s gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it’s also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.

“Robert Olmstead gets better with every book. If you know all of his previous books, you know how startling this fact is, and how startlingly good this writer is.” ─​Tom Franklin, author of Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

“The precision and poetry of the author's language have a paradoxical effect: they make the setting strange and distinct while imbuing characters and their actions with a particular immediacy . . . A story about America told through its land and its animals and its diverse people and, especially, through the experiences of two vivid, singular, powerful characters. Another gorgeous, brutal masterpiece from a great American writer.” ─Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Olmstead has a Dickensian sense of character . . . such a quantity of characters can test any novelist — managing their proportions and appearances so they maintain their own identity and momentum while making room for everyone in the wings to reappear before fading from memory. Olmstead admirably navigates this challenge.”—New York Times Book Review

“This is a powerful depiction of the brutality of the Old West, where life was cheap and easily taken.” ─Publishers Weekly

“Like so many outstanding novels about the taming of the West, there is a tragic ambiguity at the heart of Olmstead’s brutal but beautiful tale of the last buffalo hunt. For a certain kind of uncompromising yet lyrical writer – think Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, or William Kittredge – the West offers a stage for a special kind of archetypal, almost Shakespearean tragedy, and Olmstead makes the most of it.” ─Booklist (starred review)